Activities

Reading, research, and interest groups

Interdisciplinary Logic Colloquium
The interdisciplinary logic colloquium is a joint effort of several departments at the university of Konstanz, aimed at fostering cross-disciplinary communication. Its sessions have spawned new collaborations between members of the Konstanz semantics community. The colloquium usually features four talks per semester. (Note: the colloquium has its own mailing list, which you can subscribe to on its website).Coordinator: Antje Rumberg

The Constance Causal Connection (CCC)
An informal association (and sometimes reading group) of researchers interested in the representation of causal dependencies in formal semantics. Organized the Workshop on modeling causal dependencies in formal semantics in May 2017. Currently somewhat dormant, but contact Sven Lauer if you want to be kept up to date about activities.Core members: Eva Csipak, Arno Goebel, Sven Lauer, Antje Rumberg

Research projects with third-party funding

FOR 2111: Questions at the Interfaces
This DFG Research Unit investigates question formation, with a particular emphasis on non-canonical questions. It combines expertise from theoretical, computational and experimental linguistics as well as visual analytics to study how different components of grammar interface with one another to signal a particular meaning. The Research Unit features various projects with an emphasis on semantics and pragmatics of questions.

KO 5704/1: Parenthetical Meaning (Emmy Noether Group of Todor Koev)
Parentheticals constitute a large and diverse class of expressions that are linearly integrated in another linguistic structure but are typically disjoint from it in terms of constituent structure, compositional meaning, and intonation. The list of parenthetical expressions is long and includes non-restrictive relative clauses, nominal appositives, slifting parentheticals, “as”-parentheticals, “and”-parentheticals, clausal parentheticals, question tags, and speech act adverbs. This project aims at pulling together the different strands coming from previous literature and developing a comprehensive and predictive framework for studying the interpretational properties of the class of parenthetical expressions. The project will seek to establish the notion of “parenthetical meaning” as meaning that is divorced from the regular truth-conditional meaning of the main sentence but interacts with it (and the larger discourse) in various pragmatic ways. More specifically, parenthetical meaning will be investigated from the following three theoretical viewpoints:

the scopal properties of parentheticals, i.e. the ways parenthetical content interacts with operators placed elsewhere in the sentence;

the information status of parenthetical meaning, especially when compared to the regular assertion of the sentence;

the potential role of parentheticals as speech act modifiers.

The main hypothesis to be pursued is that uttering a parenthetical expression constitutes an independent speech act, one that is separate and can differ in type from the speech act performed by the remaining sentence. A sentence with parentheticals then incorporates multiple speech acts, a fact from which its major semantic properties will be claimed to follow. In studying parenthetical meaning, the project will employ research methods from theoretical linguistics and cognitive science, including tools from compositional semantics, dynamic semantics, probabilistic reasoning, and statistical modeling. The project will uncover new patterns, offer original solutions, and drive the discussion on how different layers of meaning (e.g. assertion, presupposition, implicature, questioning, etc.) interact within and beyond the sentence level.

Tense and aspect in multilingual semantic construction
This project, funded by the Nuance Foundation, aims at identifyng the relevant morphological pieces and to devise a computationally viable semantic representation of tense and aspect for a diverse collection of languages that have been developed by participants in the ParGram Project, such as English, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Wolof.